Wednesday, October 31, 2012

This eve when spirits appear and visit us 'normal' folks, with their empty bags begging for tasty treats, one can approach this hallowed night with merriment and anticipation as millions of children dress up in some of the most ghoulish outfits their parents can afford. Honestly, what a kid can do with a simple white bed sheet and some red food coloring can scare the living crap out of you.

Ahh, but we printmakers are a hearty bunch, and have done our fair share of dressing up and hosting a party or two with our inky friends. Our artistic activities can be quite inventive, too and I want to commend the activities of Carlos Barberena, (whose lovely Ghoulish Geisha girl is pictured below)

of La Calaca Press who has twice now ambitiously organized an international group of artists to commemorate this special day through All Saints day in November.

The Calaca Press International Print Exchange has realized hundreds of artists from around the globe to participate in its the Day of the Dead theme. I am going to provide you a sampling of this years' artists, and I encourage you to view their site for more images at http://calacapressinternationalprintexchange.blogspot.com.

Versions of the project are currently touring in the US, Mexico and Central America.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Peterson Kamwathi,
born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1980, now
resides in Kiambu. Kamwathi attributes his mother as having
instilled his first interest in art after she gave him a watercolor set. He graduated from the Shang Tao media Arts College in 2005 and has
gone on to work as an internationally recognized artist and teacher.

Arguably considered one of Kenya’s rising young art stars,
Kamwathi is quickly establishing himself as a major artist in Africa. The
30-year-old artist talks with the wisdom of a man twice his age. His work combines clear conceptual elements with a rich
resource from his country’s cultural, social and political history. A
story-teller in keeping with the traditions of his culture, he is also a recorder,
questioner and messenger of truth. His motivation flows from a sense of duty to
one’s society and humanity of the world. He talks about the physical and
spiritual ‘seeking Bruce’ Onabrakpeya, (who is one of Kenya’s most experimental
and prolific artists) to always look to redefine oneself and seek the truth of one’s
convictions.

Today, Kamwathi works primarily in printmaking, but he has
also explored metal, glass and mixed media drawings. Kamwathi
writes, “I have a deep interest in printmaking because of its indirectness and
to an extent its perceived rigidity in technique and expression; I am also
attracted to the medium’s history in religious, social and political advocacy.”

A good portion of Kamwathi’s social/political work has been concerned
with the iconography and process of Kenya’s 2005 first constitutional
referendum. His powerful works have also been a response to national and global
socio‐economic and political topics
like the debacle of the 2007 Kenyan General Elections that nearly brought the
country to a civil war.

His symbols are easy to
comprehend, non-threatening and authoritative. His iconography comprises the
following: indigenous donkeys or cattle with a hump (bull) which in Kenya signifies
traditional or family wealth; the ballot box which signifies democracy by rule
of law: the queue which signifies “limited resources” and, the clove which in
east Africa signifies Zanzibar’s spices and slaves trade.

Kamwathi's covered the entire
surface of his Voters’ Queue prints (like the one above) with densely packed, small ballot boxes
superimposed upon figures standing in a voters’ line. The figures are stalemated
by the ballot boxes, nonetheless, they metaphorically stand for the electorate.
They symbolize the voters’ perseverance in the face of election fraud and corruption
of the electoral process.

Insisting that his art does not advocate
political protest, Kamwathi states,“…My art is my
perception about what happens in my environment as a Kenyan,
as a Nairobean, as someone who is affected by all that is happening. I am
referencing social issues…”.

Kamwathi enjoys the
collaborative nature of printmaking and his ongoing experience with the
collective printmaking studios of Nairobi has inspired him to teach printmaking
to the next generation of Kenyan artists. He understands the importance
of encouraging younger artists to tell their own stories about culture and
political/social concerns. We can be glad that these artists have earned their right
to speak freely about the conditions they face, and that Kenyan artists are being
recognized for their artistic contributions to the world.

Kamwathi's Selected Honors and Exhibitions

2009 The Goethe Institute, Nairobi, Kenya

World
Museum, Liverpool, UK

2005Tuska Center for Contemporary Art,
University of Kentucky, USA

And group exhibitions in the
United States, England, Holland, Senegal, South Africa

Monday, October 22, 2012

Op artist Julian Stanczak, was born in eastern Poland,
(Borownica), in 1928. He is recognized as a Polish-American painter/printmaker,
and currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio. As for his education, it came
after a long period of travel during and after WWII. Stanczak migrated from a
Siberian labor camp, where he lost the use of his right arm, and had to re-train
himself to paint with his left hand. He spent some time with the Polish
army-in-exile in Persia and then migrated to Africa where he lived in Uganda.
Later on, he moved to London and eventually came to the United States in
1950 where he started his artistic studies. Stanczak received his B.F.A. degree
from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1954, and then went to Yale
University to study with Josef Albers, where
he received his M.F.A. degree in 1956.

In
addition to being an artist, Stanczak taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati
1957–64, and he taught Painting for thirty years at the Cleveland
Institute of Art, 1964-1995. He once said… "
In the search for Art, you have to separate what is emotional and what is
logical. I did not want to be bombarded daily by the past,- I looked for
anonymity of actions through non-referential, abstract art."

How
many of us can be recognized as having an art movement named after our work?
Stanczak’s first major solo show in New York was held at the Martha Jackson Gallery(1964) and was aptly called Julian
Stanczak: Optical Paintings. It was the phrase that named the Op Art movement.
He was included in MOMA’s The Responsive Eye
exhibition, and later went on to make the surface of his paintings seem to
vibrate through wavy lines and complementing color palettes. Stanczak used
repeating forms to create an art of his experience; useding varying transparent
color ranges with a formal geometric grid. From his explorations he
continued to expand the dialog already begun with Josef Albers,Richard Anuskiewiczand Illinois
Op artist Hal Rogoff.

By
1966Bridget Riley,Stanczak, RogoffandAnuszkiewicz, were all creating color op art though Stanczak's compositions were the most complex of all of the color practitioners. Taking his cue
from Albers' bookInteraction
of Color, Stanczak created various spatial experiences with color and geometry. Color has no simple systematized equivalent, but
it can derive from the electromagnetic scale in multi-dimensions that correspond to the magnitudes expressed in musical pitch energy. Stanczak arranged patterns upon
patterns so one would see them as them
as a series of transparent layered color screens.

The Origins of Op Art

Walter
Gropius’ Bauhaus alternative
school of Architecture and Applied Arts, with its disciplined style based on geometric
shapes of the cube, the rectangle and the circle was conceived with the idea of creating a educational community
of artists. When the Nazis shut down the school, many of its artists and
teachers fled Germany for Hungary and the United States. Victor Vasarely, long
considered the the ‘father’ of Op Art, trained at the Budapest school.

The
development of 20th c. art to separate itself from representational
imagery through de-emphasis of a traditional image or natural spatial concerns
as was found in Cubism and Abstract Expressionism propelled the idea of flat,
patterned optics and the move toward geometric shapes and Minimalism. Studies on the mathematical/scientific basis
of perception

(
how the eye and brain work together to perceive color, light, depth,
perspective, size, shape, and motion, and how their functional relationship - how the retina ‘sees’ patterns and the brain ‘interprets’
them) had been going on since the 1800s, had a resurgence in the 1950s and
1960s. Confusion between these two creates a visual stimuli and an optical ‘vibration’, like how some colors placed next to neutral greys appear to
create new colors, or an echo of another color, an after image, etc.

Op
Art can also be seen as having evolved from Kinetic Art . The use of repetition, pattern and line, often
in high contrast or complementary colors, was one way Op Artists used to create
this illusion of movement. The overall effect let the viewer see a vibration as the eye tried to separate the color complements. Image-wise, the
geometrically-based nature of Op Art is almost always non-representational.
However, despite this, Op artists made use of the traditional
perspective techniques to allow for an accurate
representation of the natural world in order to create the illusion of
depth/space.

Stanczak's contribution to the Op Art movement is significant and has worked from within the bounds of personal tragedy, to lock it firmly in the past and capably create a new illusion of one's perspective/perception. The tragedies of his early years in Siberia and the physical trauma of re-training himself to create with his left arm left its mark, but he did not let it dictate his ability to work, nor did it stop him from making work that is technically and mathematically perfect. His paintings and screenprints strongly align themselves with his peers and we can appreciate his antecedence at a time when younger artists like Paul Kuhn and Eve Leader are exploring the nuances of Neo-Geo abstraction.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg a.k.a. Robert Rauschenberg wasborn in the southern oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas
in 1925. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians and they believed
in instilling a hard-work ethic in their children. Rauschenberg said he never
liked school because he suffered terribly from dyslexia. After he managed to get through high school Rauschenberg
chose to go into the military, enlisting with the Navy. He was stationed in
California, and it was during a visit to the Huntington estate in Pasadena that
he was first exposed to fine art. He decided to study art after finishing his
military service and went to the Kansas City Art Institute. Then he went to France for a brief study at
the Académie Julian in Paris. and after returning to the United States in 1948
Rauschenberg went to study at the famed Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Josef Albers was one of his instructors at BMC, and Rauschenberg often
credited Albers as inspiring him to move toward
experimentation [the opposite of what Albers taught], which lead to his now
infamous combine painting/sculptures. Rauschenberg later studied with Vaclav
Vytlacil and Morris
Kantor at theArt
Students League of New York, from 1949-1952. He briefly married artist Susan Weil in
1950 and they had a son, Christopher. After his divorce he was known to be
involved with fellow artists Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Darryl Pottorf, but
he mostly kept his private life out of the public’s eye.

In 1966, Rauschenberg,
along with Billy Klüver, established a non-profit organization called Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
to promote collaborations between artists and engineers. He continued that idea
and expanded upon it in 1984, when the Rauschenberg
Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) was announced at the United Nations. This seven-year project was designed to
encourage "world peace and understanding" as he went on a ten-country
tour of Chile, China, Cuba, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Soviet Union, Tibet, and Venezuela;
leaving behind a piece of artwork about the culture he observed. The ROCI
venture, supported by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was exhibited in 1991.

In 1990, Rauschenberg created the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RFF) to promote awareness of the
causes he cared about, such as world peace, the environment and humanitarian
issues. In 2011, the foundation launched its “Artist as Activist” print project which will invitean artist to
come to work at the late artist’s estate on Captiva Island in Florida to create
an editioned work on a subject of his/her choice. The foundation also maintains
the 19th Street Project Space in New
York. Additionally, Rauschenberg set up one-time only grants via Change, Inc., to assist
financially-challenged visual artists.

Artistically, Rauschenberg questioned the difference between art
and everyday objects, much in the same vein that Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" revisited art’s meaning in the eye of the observer. In in
Rauschenberg created an international incident in 1953 when he asked Abstract
Expressionism’s leader, Willem DeKooning, to participate in an ‘art experiment’ where he
‘erased’ a multimedia drawing by de
Kooning. The result initially
sent shock waves throughout the art world for defacing a work of art by a
modern master, but the concept held
ground and he was seen as a pioneer of Neo-Dada.

"Combines" mainly refers to Rauschenberg's work begun from
1954 to 1962. Critics first saw these as difficult to interpret due to his densely-laden
imagery with no apparent order to their presentation. By 1962, Rauschenberg regularly
utilized appropriated images from mainstream newspapers and magazines. He
transferred photographs to canvas via the silkscreen
process and this touched off a firestorm of interest
in printmaking. Rauschenberg liked the multiplicity of creating images, and continued
to embrace this flattened over-layered image for the rest of his career, but he
challenged the parameters of the medium like everything else he touched. This
work propelled him to become seen as one of the pivotal artists of the Pop Art movement
and put him on a par with Andy Warhol.

As for his prints, one of the first series he attempted was the
16.5-meter-long silkscreen print called Currents (1970), and
his Surfaces project (which soon
followed). They both consisted of large-scale screened prints with newspaper
headlines and textures, creating the illusion of looking at a television screen
with bad reception. The air wave patterns he created while layering his images
cover over and obscure the messages of the clippings. His subtle yet
hit-you-over-the-head commentary about the effects of bombarding our ever-acquiring
society with information couldn’t have been better timed. It pre-dated the movement
of social consciousness and political art which defined work in the 70s.
Likewise, Rauschenberg’s obsessive exploration of alternative media and
manipulation allowed him a freedom to break with traditional means of making
art. His combines and assemblages broke new ground and liberated younger
artists to mix media, much in the same manner as Pablo Picasso’s assemblages, or
Frank Stella’s combined sculpture/painted/prints of the late 1980s.

In printmaking, Rauschenberg left no inked method untouched. He
printed with anything available; including a rubber car tire and etched sheets
of glass and backlit them within a frame. One of his multi-media prints
stretches a staggering ¼ mile in length. His prints’ subjects spanned all the
current events of the mid-20thc, and they brought a new voice to the collage
method introduced by Picasso fifty years prior. One of his last
technological innovations was making large-scale digital Iris prints and using
biodegradable vegetable dyes in his transfer processes, which advanced the
medium toward the bio-friendly movement in the 1990s.

Robert Rauschenberg was
a dominant force behind the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, and he continued to
challenge himself artistically up until his death. As a printmaker,
Rauschenberg was a leader in the social/political circles. His comments were not
only pointed, but they were diplomatic and ‘inclusive’. Some saw the work as a
mere reflection of ‘current’ events, but looking back on those Currents and Surfaces series now, one can see his vision was a clear and pointed
criticism of the mass media frenzy which surrounded people and events of the
day. He was unafraid of people’s responses to the work, and said what he wanted
to say. You see, he felt he had nothing to lose. He came from no art
experience, from a nothing town to become a pinnacle voice of the 20th
c. art world. He felt his background permitted him a fresh look at the world,
and left him untainted by his ignorance. The viewer was called to give an
opinion of what they saw and responded to his word collages at a time which
pre-dated Joseph Kosuth’s conceptualist group and their minimal ‘worded’ images
of the 1970s. From 2003 Rauschenberg worked at his home and studio on Captiva Island, in Florida. He died there in 2008, from
heart failure, but his legacy continues a support for younger artists,
artists in need and intercultural exchange.

Honors and Awards

1964
the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Alice Elizabeth
Catlett was born in Washington DC in 1915
(or 1919), the youngest of three children.
Both of her parents were educators, and she, too, chose a profession that
blended education as well as the arts. She studied design, printmaking and
drawing at Howard University and
received her B.S. degree in 1935. Working as a high school teacher in North
Carolina, Catlett left the position after two years, because low wages available
to African-Americans. In 1940 Catlett became the first student to receive an
M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. While there, she studied with Grant Wood, at
whose urging Catlett began to work with the subject of African-Americans, especially black women.

Catlett
moved to Chicago in 1941, studied ceramics at the Art Institute
of Chicago, and printmaking at the Art
Students League of New York in 1942-1943.After graduation she
moved to New Orleans to teach at the historically black institution Dillard University,
and met and married Charles White.Five
years later, after her divorce from White, she left New Orleans for New York to
study with the sculptor Ossip
Zadkine.
He encouraged Catlett to work in a more abstract direction. While in New York,
she became the Promotion Director of Harlem’s George Washington Carver School which boasted famed photographer Roy DeCarava as one of their students.

In
1946, Catlett received a fellowship that allowed her to
travel to Mexico where she studied at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, Esmeralda, Mexico. In 1947, she
married Mexican artist Francisco Mora, settled there permanently, and later become
a Mexican citizen. Eventually she gave up her American citizenship and was
declared an ‘undesirable alien’ by
the US State Department; a situation which forced her to obtain a special visa
to attend the opening of her 1971 solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in
Harlem.

Catlett
worked with a group of printmakers at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, (People's Graphic
Arts Workshop) in Mexico City. Artists Leopoldo Méndez, Raul Anguiano, Luis
Arenal, and Pablo O'Higgins organized the group in 1937, and focused their art toward
creating a social change. The TGP inspired her to reach out to the broadest
possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration. She
and other artists created a series of linoleum cuts on black heroes and "did posters, leaflets, collective
booklets, illustrations for textbooks, posters and illustrations for the
construction of schools, against illiteracy in Mexico."

Catlett
was arrested during a railroad workers’ strike in Mexico City in 1949. Like
other artists and activists, she felt the political tensions of the McCarthy
years. The TGP was thought to have ties to the Communist Party; and although Catlett
never joined the party, her first husband had been a member, so she was closely
watched by the United States Embassy.

She was concerned with the social dimension of her art. “I have always wanted my art to service my people — to reflect us, to
relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.” For
example, her Sharecropper
print refers to the injustices of an unfair system exerted on the poor and
showed her lifelong concern for the oppressed and the dignity of women. She was
a ground-breaking personality and her tenacity to seek a career when
segregation presented limited opportunities drove her to make art and speak the
truth of her own experiences. She was as much beloved in Mexico as the US, and worked up until
her death at age 96.

Before I embark upon the biography of this amazing man, I want to relate some thoughts. I will confess that I dreaded the day would come when the famed and highly esteemed printmaker/teacher Mauricio Lasansky would leave this world for a better place. I mourned his passing as though my own grandfather had died, because I felt in fact he was my artistic and spiritual ancestor. At least, that's what I came to feel having studied with one of his students, Robert Wolfe, at Miami University(OH).

Mauricio Leib Lasansky(1914-2012) was an Argentine-American graphic
artist and printmaker. He chose to focus his artistic energies on the
development of printmaking and drawing, thus making him one of a few Modern era
artists to do so. The result is a life full of experimentation and dedication
to his craft. Lasansky is widely considered to be one of the pioneers in the graphic
arts evolution and making the art world look at the medium as critically as any
other field. He will forever be enshrined as one of the first and best generations
of artists who have defined and guided printmaking in the United States. He is
revered as one of the true "Fathers of 20th Century American
Printmaking."

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lasansky’s
parents were Eastern
European Jews; his Lithuanian-born father, who had made his way to Argentina via North America,
had worked as a printer and engraver at the US Mint in Philadelphia. As a
talented and ambitious young man of 22, Lasansky became Director of the Free
Fine Arts School, in Villa Maria, Cordoba, Argentina. Six years later, he was
honored with the first of five highly coveted Guggenheim Fellowships, and he
went to the United States to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study their print
collection, which numbers well over 100,000! While there, he learned the
history of printmaking and networked with other artists who had also moved to
the states.

After Mauricio married Emilia Barragan in 1937, he began to exhibit his work, regularly winning
awards and prizes, and in the 1940s he
and many other artists began to work in printmaking through the WPAgraphic arts workshops. Several printmaking
studios were established and Lasansky chose to work at the famous Atelier 17, which was established by British
artist Stanley William Hayter. Atelier
17 was the first independent American workshop devoted to the Intaglio printmaking process
and it developed an international reputation. The artists from this era , like Mark
Rothko and Jackson Pollock, who also worked
at Atelier 17, are now referred to as theNew York School and their Abstract Expressionist method
of working changed intaglio printmaking in America. Many of these artists’
experiments in intaglio printmaking lead to them being invited to organize
printmaking departments in universities all across the country.

In 1945, Lasansky was invited to direct and teach the printmaking
program at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, IA. The program became one of
the premiere places to study printmaking in the US, producing hundred and
hundreds of artists/teachers. At the time of his death, Lasansky was recognized
as the Virgil M. Hancher Professor Emeritus,
head of Printmaking in the School of Art and Art History, where he had taught
for more than forty years.

Many
of Lasansky's former students went on to teach at reputable universities to
spread the word about printmaking. Some of those former students include Keith Achepohl, Glen Alps, Lee Chesney,
David Driesbach, John Ilhe, John Paul Jones, and Robert Wolfe. The passing of the printmaking torch from
generations of teachers to students is what marks the legacy of Atelier 17,
Hayter and Lasansky.

Lasansky’s art is known for his large scale prints (some
being four by eight feet in length), utilizing multiple plates (up to 60) and in
full color. He even designed a specially-milled French paper for his prints so
they would withstand a large amount of printing which often combined etching,drypoint,aquatint
andengraving intaglio
techniques. Throughout his career, he preferred figurative subjects, seeing
them as important as the technical side of his work.

Lasansky is internationally known for a series that marked a departure from his beloved intaglio method,
The Nazi Drawings, This series speaks in a most
raw and scathing manner about the brutality ofNazi Germany upon its victims. He worked six
years on the project, which consists of thirty individual life-sized pieces and
one triptych. Their effect upon the viewer is shock and horror. His figures are
like ghosts passing through Hell, and he shows them living through their fears in
a nightmare that disgustingly was real. Surprisingly,
the drawings were created primarily with lead pencil on common commercial
paper. "I wanted them to be done with a
tool used by everyone everywhere. From the cradle to the grave, meaning the
pencil."And speaking
of his inspiration, he said…“The Hitler
years were in my belly, and I tried many times to do the drawings,” he said. “But
then I decided, the hell with it. Why don’t I just put down what I feel? The
fact is that people were killed — how cool can you play that?”The Nazi
Drawings was one of the first exhibits ever shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been
exhibited in many prominent art museums. They can now be seen at University of Iowa Museum of Art.

In closing, Mauricio Lasansky created some of the most powerful
images in contemporary art. He has contributed significantly to printmaking being
considered a critical and serious art form of the 20th century and for that our
[printmakers] debt to his commitment cannot be repaid.

*His work is represented in more than one hundred public
collections including virtually EVERY major museum in the United States i.e. the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, DC., the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

*Internationally recognized, he has been exhibited throughout
North and South America, Europe and Russia.